The Muslim minority in Denmark will send delegations to a number of Muslim countries to meet with senior officials and prominent scholars on the provocative caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) recently published by Denmark's main daily.
"A delegation will visit Cairo to meet with Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi," Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a prominent Muslim figure in Denmark, told IOL Friday, November 18.
...
The images, considered blasphemous under Islam, have drawn rebuke from the Muslim minority especially with the paper's adamancy to apologize on the ground of freedom of expression.
"We want to internationalize this issue so that the Danish government would realize that the cartoons were not only insulting to Muslims in Denmark but also to Muslims worldwide," said Abu Laban.
Why have the protests erupted from Muslims worldwide only now? The person who knows the answer to this question is Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a man that the Washington Post has recently profiled as “one of Denmark’s most prominent imams.”
Last November, Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian who had served as translator and assistant to top Gamaa Islamiya leader Talaal Fouad Qassimy during the mid-1990s and has been connected by Danish intelligence to other Islamists operating in the country, put together a delegation that traveled to the Middle East to discuss the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars. The delegation met with Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, and Sunni Islam’s most influential scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi. “We want to internationalize this issue so that the Danish government will realize that the cartoons were insulting, not only to Muslims in Denmark, but also to Muslims worldwide,” said Abu Laban.
On its face, it would appear as if nothing were wrong. However, the Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face.
But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that “mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty.” And in a quintessential exercise in taqiya, Abu Laban has praised the boycott of Danish goods on al Jazeera, while condemning it on Danish TV.
In London, hundreds of Muslims converged on Denmark’s Embassy and burned the country’s flag Friday to protest the caricatures. Women wearing headscarves chanted and held banners proclaiming: “Kill the one who insults the Prophet.”
“The only way this will be resolved, is if those who are responsible are turned over so they can be punished by Islamic law, so that they can be executed,” said Abu Ibraheem, 26, from Luton. “There are no apologies... Those responsible would have to be killed.”
As if to sum up the cultural rift between Islam and the West, outspoken imam Ahmed Abu Laban told worshippers at Friday prayers in a Copenhagen mosque: “In the West, freedom of speech is sacred; to us, the prophet is sacred.”
É este o homem que hoje em Copenhaga condenava "vigorosamente" a violência.
<< Blogue